Okay, so not New York. Very much the old York. (Old, original and best? Maybe not.) And not in that order either. And actually, it was Harrogate with a day trip or two to York followed by London and then Paris. But you get the gist. I'm living the life of an international popstar. Or jet setter. Or tourist, depending on how you like to view these things.
Traditionally in our household, or so it seems, the company that employs The Man I Married, likes to send him off on long business trips right around about the school holidays. It's the reason we bought a tent, so that I could escape with his offspring and relieve the tension felt at being left behind while the other local offspring get to go off on fun family holidays. This year, I extracted two promises from him. 1. He would be available for at least SOME of the long Easter break this year. 2. This year, he's not to abandon me sans voiture in the depths of Normandy (not once, but twice) in the middle of our main summer break. He kept the first. I'll no doubt report back on the second at a later date.
So, being a complete family unit for the second week of the Easter Break, we figured we'd take advantage and organise a little trip away. Mother is incapacitated after her second hip operation, so there was no danger of her coming with us and it felt safe to venture back to Yorkshire. Just the five of us. Bliss.
If I haven't mentioned this before, since Dad died almost five years ago, I can't tell her I'm going anywhere without her wanting to cadge a lift too. I've starting lying about where we're going in the hope that she doesn't know anyone in (for instance) Stoke and won't nag endlessly about how helpless she is and how I'm her only means of travel and she never gets out. (We don't have trains in Scotland you see. Or at least, not ones that Mother is willing to travel on.) I should add that The Man I Married has regularly offered to drive her to her sister's house, or even to drive her halfway while my brother meets her and takes her the rest of the way. This is "too much" and she "couldn't" ask us to do that. But encroaching on every other trip we make is okay apparently. And I do sometimes wonder how it can be that a woman who "never gets out" is never available to do any babysitting because she's "out" or "away" that day! Still. This wasn't meant to turn into a "Mother Rant". It's amazing how easy it is to do that though.
So. York. Okay, Harrogate. (I have relatives in Harrogate. Mother would have wanted to come down with us if we'd been going to Harrogate. Even if it meant amputating her leg for the duration of the journey. York is sufficiently far away from Harrogate to make it "not very convenient" as a drop-off point. So for Mother Purposes, we went to York. Even though it was really Harrogate. We felt so guilty that we did make two day trips to York though. Just so the kids wouldn't give the game away. Oh the tangled web....
Travelling four hundred odd miles in a car with three children is always an interesting experience. It doesn't matter how many times you tell them to go to the loo before you set off, you can guarantee that one of them will be "desperate" within an hour of leaving the house. The other two won't want to go and there you have your first fight of the trip.
Kid at the Bottom of the Heap always wants someone to stand outside her toilet cubicle because she's afraid of being locked in. I don't mind doing it, but on this particular occasion I was also pretty desperate (three double espressos before hitting the carseat is not a good plan. I really should know that by now) and so I asked Kid In The Middle to do Door Guarding Duty for me. I might have asked her to lick the floor clean from the expression on her face. "Someone might....seeeeeeeeee me!" So? Oh! Realisation dawned. She's ten and a half years old and we've hit that pre-pubescent phase where everything and anything has the potential to cause huge, massive, overwhelming, all-encompassing and utterly unfounded embarrassment. I was tempted to burst into a song and dance routine and then instantly remembered my Dear Departed Dad doing just that to me and that killed the impulse dead as a dead thing. Oh God. It might have been more than three decades ago but I can still feel that crippling anxiety that I was going to be embarrassed. And worse, blush. Nope. No song and dance routine from me then.
Back on the road, fully refreshed with more diuretics and a vague sense of having been completely ripped off in the sandwich department, we come to the sticky issue of in-car entertainment. When I was a kid this consisted of little more than a few rounds of Pub Cricket and Eye Spy until Mother got sick of it and made us recite our Times Tables instead. Ah, the memories.
These days of course, we all zoom down three lane motorways (when they're not clogged up like a furry artery) and there isn't exactly a plethora of pub signs over which to argue.
(For those who have never had the pleasure, pub cricket works by being the first to spot pub signs and work out how many points each is worth. You could earn points for heads (1), arms (2) and legs (3) So, The Three Lions would have 12 legs and three heads for a total of 39 points. No limb points available for the King's Head. Unless the executioner was depicted in which case you could claim for arms, legs and another head! Four points for The King's Arms, but only after much arguing over the definition of arms. If the King's Arms depicted critters you substituted the four points for however many (for example) lions rampant and their associated limbs that you could see. Unless your opponent was particularly dumb in which case you could claim for the arms as well. Sorry Brother of Mine. The Coach and Horses might provide as few as twelve points if no driver is portrayed on the pub sign, or as many as you like if you could persuade your fellow travellers than in fact there had been eight horses a driver and a crow depicted. Discussions as to whether wings counted as limbs would take you to the next pub. It wasn't much, and it was still maths, but it was better than endless recitation of tables.)
My children, theoretically at least, fare much better. We have ipods, dvd players, fold down tables with cup holders. It's just like being at home only, cosier. A tiny part of me wonders if they'll look back on their childhood travels with any fondness at all, given that they spend most of the travelling part glued to various bits of electronic gadgetry. But I'm not about to launch into a soliloquy about the "good old days". I'd have given my eye teeth for a Nintendo DSi at their age instead of trying to play noughts and crosses with my cheating brother on a napkin that kept ripping as we tried to write on it. No, my only grievance with all this portable gameware and viewing pleasure is that if I'm not the one driving the car, then I'm the one left to sort out the chargers. This means wires and plugs all tangled in a bag and snaking around my person from cigarette charger to the back seat. It's almost worse than dealing with mismatched coathangers.
One of the great inventions of the last couple of decades was the Premier Inn. My children don't know how lucky they are. Unless you're about my age or older, you might never have had the pleasure of a good old fashioned B&B. Peeling wallpaper, sinks that rattled when you turned the tap. The tap which looked like it might come adrift at any moment. In the shared bathroom. That strange smell which I think was probably a combination of cigarette smoke, burnt bacon, old teapots, newspapers and Zoflora. With a bit of wet dog thrown in for good measure. Swirly orange carpets, badly executed floral still life paintings, usually done by the landlady herself, or worse, portraits of the wet dog. Mismatched tablecloths, plastic carnations in little glasses decorated with Spanish-looking flowers and the immortal word "Southend!", inspite of being in Essex. It was as though most of them were rehearsing for being retirement homes.
Say what you like about the purple place, but at least you know what you're going to get: a clean room with a clean bathroom and an all you can eat breakfast. And no surprises. Although the one we stayed in did have a lingering smell of lavender which is what reminded me so strongly of my own childhood adventures!
However we didn't sit in a car for the better part of five and half hours just to stare at the four recently painted walls of our Premier Inn. And given that the framed print on the wall of this room was identical to the framed print on the wall of the last P.I. we'd stayed at, the artwork wasn't really much of an inspiration either.
We had planned to take the children to see Old Mother Shipton's Cave on arrival. But the cold sharp wind that sprang out of nowhere didn't make it an appealing prospect to us much less hardy adults so we opted for The York Dungeons instead. Even if it turned out to be overpriced, overrated and over the top it had the advantage of being indoors. Once we'd finished queuing /freezing our buns off outside that is. Still, we were "entertained" by a medieval looking chap with bad teeth and acne while we waited. Apparently his name was Kevin, he was from Merseyside and was still getting over the shock that York wasn't as posh as he'd been told.
Inside, after nearly fainting at the cost of a family ticket plus one child (not sure which child was considered the "extra" - Kid The Eldest for being the closest to an adult, or Kid at the Bottom of the Heap for being an afterthought?) we began our adventures by having our photographs taken. Mmmm. Another means of extracting cash from the hapless tourist. At this point, Kid at the Bottom of the Heap decided she was scared. Not just a bit scared, but pant-wettingly terrified. We bought the picture at the end of the tour simply to see just how miserable one child on a fun day out could look. She proceeded to howl and scream and cry her way through the first two thirds of the tour. Only when the torturer locked up The Man I Married and threatened to remove his genitals with a rather gruesome slicing machine did she begin to cheer up. Not sure if I should read anything into this or not.
In the end, we all came out smiling. The Dungeons had been fun, and there'd been just enough of a smattering of educational value to make us feel just a leetle bit worthy. Oh yes. We entertain and educate all at the same time in this house. After terrifying them of course.
Day two and Mother Shipton was going to have wait a bit longer. The Offspring were bitterly disappointed as for some reason this had become the most anticipated part of our trip. However, more indoor delights awaited at the York National Railway Museum. This is one of my favourite places. Not because I like trains all that much, but there is something fascinating about the degree of engineering capability from so far back. Technology these days is lost on me for the most part - it's all chips and circuit boards that you can't see. But with engines and shunts and hydraulics and nuts and bolts you can see which bit does what job and it all fits together and works. And some of it is quite beautiful to look at too. Amazingly intricate shapes wrought from great lumps of metal. This was lost on the Offspring who just turned grumpy. Well, not Kid The Eldest. He's a bit of a train nut and was in 7th Heaven, as was the Man I Married. But Kid In The Middle and Kid at the Bottom of The Heap looked about as happy as the condemned man in the Dungeon. Until they realised that there was a Helter Skelter. And a miniature railiway and a simulator. One ride on a virtual roller coaster and suddenly we were having fun again.
We did make it to Mother Shipton and her cave. And inspite of being worried that all the build-up would lead to an inevitable anti-climax, my kids loved it. Basically, a walk through the woods alongside the river at Knaresborough, there shouldn't have been all that much to recommend it. But the path leads to a natural waterfall which contains so much calcium carbonate that anything left in the water turns to "stone". This phenomenon has been in existence for years and years - it's effectively a stalactite that is growing in front of your eyes. Objects placed under the solidified "wall" under the running water become calcified over a three month period. You can see where someone left a hat over a hundred years ago and all that is left is a lump in the wall.
And that was really it. There was a quiz to do, a wishing well and a statue of Old Mother Shipton in her cave but it evidently caught their imagination because it was the most talked-about activity of our Easter Break - more so than the simulator at the Railway Museum, more so than any of the special effects in the Dungeons. The best bit for all of them was a walk in the woods and a ten pence wish in a rock pool. Perhaps I should teach them Pub Cricket afterall.
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